09/09/2008

Adding a unique perspective to the SOA Consortium’s SOA & Event processing day, Bruce Henderson, Chief Scientist of Savant, spoke of the connection between services, event processing and mashups. Bruce shared his thesis that many major business, geo-political and societal problems arise because we don’t know enough to avoid them. Despite swimming in data from a vast number of sources, the inability to relate and interact with that information has organizations operating out of rear view mirrors. As Bruce succinctly stated, “What we don’t know can hurt us”.

Supporting his thesis, Bruce spoke of three major events, the dotcom bubble, the September 11 attacks and the U.S. housing market implosion, whose impact could have been reduced had the available, yet scattered, data been correlated and viewed in totality. Bruce then shared his prediction, based on applying Savant’s information agility techniques to publicly available FDIC reports, that the US Banking System faces impending failures similar to Northern Rock in the UK.

Completing the circle, Bruce demonstrated three of Savant’s mashup projects, including the US Banking System mashup that incorporates a trend visual to show mortgage portfolios, related write-offs and balance sheet strength of major US banks.

To listen to an audio recording of Bruces’s presentation and view the slides go here.

Bruce's talk is the sixth podcast recorded at the June meeting, and the second of three from our SOA & Event Processing day.